A Matter of Time: Home Automation Services Company Vivint Uses Agent Downtime to Increase Productivity

A Matter of Time: Home Automation Services Company Vivint Uses Agent Downtime to Increase Productivity

Article excerpt

Vivint provides home security, energy management, and automation services to more than 675,000 customers in the United States and Canada. The 400 agents in its customer service and retention groups support multiple products, but still have their share of downtime, a drain on productivity at most contact centers.

But not at Vivint. Since installing the RightTime intraday management solution from Intradiem (formerly Knowlagent) in October, the Provo, Utah-based company has found time to deliver the training agents need to handle the company's various offerings and rapid release schedule, while maintaining service-level commitments and staffing levels.

Within five days of introducing Right-Time, Vivint delivered 2,400 training and coaching sessions, all during idle time.

Use of RightTime has increased every month since. In April alone, Vivint used roughly four hours of downtime per agent to complete 4,000 tasks and deliver 12,000 training sessions.

Average call handling time has decreased by 5 percent. The company has seen dramatic increases in its "fixed on the phone" metric, which measures the agents' ability to address the callers' issues during the initial conversation.

Prior to the implementation, Vivint's agents typically received one training session per week, and it was hard to tell which agents had completed particular sessions. All new hires were segmented out for training, and the rest of the session was filled in with "anyone we could [take] off of the phone during overstaffed periods," recalls Tim Izatt, Vivint's director of customer service.

"Before ... it was extremely difficult for us to deliver the amount of training and coaching our agents require," he says. "We spent a lot of time worrying about how we'd get everybody off the phone for training, how we'd get the information to them."